Since the beginning of the outbreak, use of Zoom has increased by 300%. Microsoft Teams reported an increase of 12 million daily users just in the first two weeks of March. Many of these will be employees of financial services institutions. Many will have opted for free-use packages, enabling them to collaborate with their teams without the need for higher authorisation.

This makes it almost impossible for firms to meet their monitoring and reporting requirements. Even for those which have fully integrated collaboration tools, having such a vast number of employees using them outside of a more controlled office environment has made it substantially harder to meet compliance requirements.

In the meantime, regulations are still being enforced, and penalties for non-compliance imposed. The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has warned that despite the unprecedented nature of the coronavirus outbreak, it will not permit firms to forgo their communications compliance obligations.

To avoid falling foul of regulators while maintaining staff productivity, firms must make it easy for their employees to use collaboration tools and to work from home in a compliant manner. Firms need to be able to capture, monitor and supervise data across the wide array of platforms their employees are using. This data needs to be archived in its native format, and in a way that will be easy to search and recall during potential investigations at a later date.